You know, it’s hard to even parse. I read the quotes and I assumed he meant that this hypothetical friends are much less carefully about what they store in their house then what they store on their profiles, so their house is less filtered (by them) than their profiles are. But your reading made me go back and check that he does, in fact, seem to be indicating that the filtering is done by *him*, in choosing them. Which you’re right aboutthat makes no sense at all.

But yeah, right now if you compared by online reading profile with the actuall gigantic pile of books in my room, you would come up with a very different things.

Yeah. It’s not even really a rebuttal so much as a tantrum, b/c it’s not so much an argument as a whinge.

This seems to be the week in which I dignify arguments ranging from kind-of-dumb (McWhorter) to fully-stupid by suggesting ways in which they could, almost be defensible.

But… I figured since I endorsed (slightly) a smart version of this two weeks ago, it was worth an update.

By the way, if you google “Snarkmarket Serendipity,” you get posts going back for years that deal with this same dumb-ass not-even-an-observation.

Reading on the web can lead to tunnel vision. A lot of our digital behavior tends towards mediocrity and me-tooism and reflexive fandom or anti-fandom. Twitter isn’t some utopian place where everything magical happens. Our old public and mainstream places were more contested than we sometimes think, and the contestation there was their value – just as it’s much of what’s valuable about digital culture today.

I have a similar attitude towards really bad stuff in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s the one paper that everyone I know, including my mathematician and political scientist friends, is likely to read – so when there’s something in there that is really stupid, especially about literary criticism, I feel like I have to say something.

But the last thing is that part of the story value has to do with standards and circulation of the publication. If it’s on Darlin’s blog, it doesn’t matter if it’s not quite all the way there yet. For one thing, it can be iterated. For another, it hasn’t been given the imprimatur of the organization.

Part of my temper tantrum isn’t just “this is stupid” – it is “this is stupid and the NYT printed it anyways” – which is also “this is stupid and a lot of people have smart things to say and the NYT is printing this instead of them”…